Early Look: iPad Has Familiar Feel to an iPhone User

By

Geoffrey A. Fowler

Updated Jan. 28, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET

With its introduction of the iPad,
Apple
Inc.
has created a big brother to the iPhone. But it may also have redefined the laptop.

On Wednesday, the company allowed journalists to spend a few minutes playing with the iPad after it was unveiled. The most surprising thing about the gadget was its familiarity: Anyone who has used an iPhone or iPod touch would be able to start using the iPad right away.

The large glass screen— which is prone, like the iPhone's, to collect finger grease—is controlled by tapping and sliding a finger around. While some new applications and games make special use of multiple fingers and hands, there are no new gestures to learn or secret handwriting codes to decipher.

"They're not diverging too much at all from what we already have grown to expect from them, but that suits me just fine," said
Mark Rolston,
chief creative officer of design firm Frog Design, who followed the iPad's unveiling online. "It's truly the 'casual computer.'"

With its larger size, the iPad's virtual keyboard comes a step closer than the iPhone's to replicating a real keyboard, with "keys" people can touch with two hands and all of their fingers. But using it is still slower and more mistake-prone than typing on a mechanical keyboard because the virtual keyboard offers no tactile response.

Still, its 1.5 pounds and slim shape give the iPad some advantages over a regular laptop. It's like a "large screen product that lives on the couch," said
Yves Béhar,
who designed the One Laptop Per Child machine at his design firm Fuseproject. "It will be the ultimate media controller and media consumption device."

Don Norman,
a tech-design pioneer and professor of design at Northwestern University, went a step further. "I think it has redefined the computer," he said. "The laptop is now obsolete. The multitouch interface now extends to word processing and spreadsheets."

At Apple's event, reporters waited in a line outside the door for the chance to get in and touch the iPad. Some journalists laid out their
Amazon.com
Inc.
Kindles and
Sony
Corp.
Readers on the table to compare the two. No one seemed quite sure how to hold the Apple device, with some cradling it and others gingerly setting it on the table.

Indeed, the iPad is a delicate piece of electronics that people probably won't want to hand over to a young child. Even with a rounded metal edge protecting it, the glass screen could prove fragile.

And it still isn't clear how well the iPad will do outdoors or in direct sunlight. The room where Apple let reporters test the device was dim, and in there its back-lit screen looked bright. Amazon's Kindle, by comparison, does best in direct light, since its E Ink screen is reflective, like a piece of paper.

For long-form reading, the iPad is also larger and heavier than the entry-level Kindle. The iPad can be held with one hand, but that hand may soon tire. Still, the iPad's color screen makes the e-books displayed on a virtual shelf look beautiful, and the device can show color photos and videos, which could make it particularly attractive to teachers and students.

Apple's New iPad

The iPad lacks a few elements that could make it a truly all-in-one device. While there's a microphone on the side, there's no camera on the front or back that would permit video calls with friends and family.

The iPad also has some disadvantages over a regular laptop. At least in the test model, it wasn't possible to run more than one application at a time.

In addition, in the iPad's word-processing program, called Pages, there were none of the drop-down file menus and options that users have come to expect on regular computers.

And since the iPhone operating system can run only one application at a time, copying and pasting something from another app—such as a Web site— requires that you close the Pages app. Fortunately, the iPad auto-saves your work, launching it automatically when you reopen Pages.

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